


The Prince, The story, And the Pond Woman.

by Leftleg



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Conspiracy, F/M, Heart Attacks, Long winded, M/M, Magic, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Paranoia, Possibly Unrequited Love, Princes, Royalty, Writer's Block, YEAH I SAID IT, and knights in shining ink stains, castle living, dhfsdhf, fakir said fuck the monarchy, forest living, heart diseases, mytho thinks his guards are tryingto kill him
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-05 17:52:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18833713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leftleg/pseuds/Leftleg
Summary: Mytho, a very bored and well-loved prince has fallen in love with someone.Fakir, who had fallen in love once, is loved by none but Nature herself.Duck, who had never loved anyone before, is now loving everyone at once.





	The Prince, The story, And the Pond Woman.

Prince Mytho...was distraught! Flabbergasted! Bewildered!

He was shocked and enraged and overwhelmed, almost apoplectic, and most of all, he was madly in love.

He was so madly in love that he didn't know what to do, his still healing heart, emaciated from sickness from birth, struggled to keep up with the pace of his wild emotions, and rattled subcutaneously in careful, uneven beats. He could have a heart attack at any moment and die, yet even then he was sure the feeling that twisted inside his chest like a knife in the back of a dog wouldn't go away.

He was a slave to the feeling of love.

And because of that, Mytho in all his princely glory, ate at the far end of the egregiously long dining table that went from point A to B and barely tapped the nose of C, chewing very slowly and stared off belligerently into the near-far distance at the large arching doors at the other end of the dining hall, guarded by two guards with big swords and funny hats that flopped leftwards like melted candy, and stern, square faces that only moved to blink their beady little eyes. They were there for his protection, shockingly, despite there being no actual mortal danger in his kingdom aimed at his glowing direction. Not like he’d expect to have enemies, considering he didn’t do much of anything anyway that would make anyone want to harm him or hate him for any reason at any time. He was arguably the least problematic and least hated person in the kingdom.

Perhaps, he figured on on-and-off-again occasions, that the guards weren't actually guarding him at all, and were instead there to stare him in the face and find a reason to hate him. He figured that they were spies for the public  sent to catch him off-topic and off-duty, which was an idea that he didn’t like too well, because that meant that there were people who did not trust him, and he had been raised with the idea that if you did not trust anyone, that subsequently meant that you hated them, and Mytho had quite the thing for not being hated.

He enjoyed it.

He dropped his silver spoon into his silver bowl and dropped his elbows onto the table and sighed over his lunch of clam chowder. The gut-punch of love had made him lose his appetite and made him extremely irate and frustrated because he was hurting physically and emotionally. Love, a strange thing, had wormed its way into his body and fed off of his flesh and blood parasitically, yet did not sicken him enough to be cause of worry, as if it was some subacute illness.

He sighed, anemic hands fondling their way into thick white hair in a backward, coy attempt to massage away the drumming headache in the middle of his cranium. It was a shameful thing to be in love because to be in love meant one had to be vulnerable and open to be hurt and put to all sorts of shame and embarrassment, and it was beneath Mytho’s princely status to ever be subject to embarrassment and shame, yet, because he was a true human being with a heart that knew no bounds or preferences or rules, he had fallen in love anyway.

He wanted to shout about it. Scream his anger at the gods, knew it was impossible, and then shouted at his guards at the far end of his egregiously long table by the large arching doors with their big swords and funny, flopping melted hats. He yelled about the pain in his chest, clutched it, and fainted onto the stone floor with a horrific thud and breathtaking crack that knocked a piece of his back molars onto his tongue, and left him deaf for an hour in his right ear.

* * *

 At the other side of the kingdom which was almost as a far a distance as the other side of the world itself, in a clearing in a large forest where there were few other neighbors of human ancestry and plenty that had none, was a man named Fakir, who was hunched over his creaking wooden writing desk like a flower with a heavy drip of water on its petals. The tip of his feather pen scratched across the papyrus paper, the tip sharp and golden in the afternoon light that perfectly poured into his room from the open double slide window, and the dark maroon ink that slipped from the pen slit glew then dried in a matter of sweet and simple seconds. He was focused, eyebrows pressed towards the center of his forehead, jaws clenched, and his hand moving with a quickness of passionate intensity. He was creating art. Life. Stories for the future about the past and places he had never been but imagined to be as grand as the depths of the oceans, as expansive as the plains of Africa, and as dense as the forests of the Amazons.

Birds twittered on his window sill, cats purred around his ankles. Inchworms and butterflies and moths settled on the thick green leaves of vining plants, sipped at the nectar inside of the flowers like convivial friends in the foyer, and said nothing. The trees whispered gossips, their branches locked and holding, hugging close and friendly. Mother Nature herself loved Fakir’s stories, and like this, she sent her children to spy on him and his work. She taught the vines of his creeping Ivy to read, they spoke to the breezes, and the breezes told the trees whose own leaves would tell all the sweet squirrels and birds and snakes and cats and anyone else who spoke hush and wanted to know, and they then relayed it to her, the queen of all nature in a tongue only she could understand.

I tell you all this because Mother Nature had fallen in love with his stories, his writing, and loved them so much that she once sent out to him the largest Culzean stag, his coat pearl colored and albescent, his antlers big and winding towards the blackened midnight sky, and it was her messenger to him. It kissed his palms and blessed his writing hand with a magic so overwhelming and beautiful that it made him both proud and afraid to have ever claimed himself an author.

Mother Nature had blessed him with the ability to create life with his words and ink. Every mythical creature, every cherub or ageless beauty he imagined and formed with his maroon ink, became reality somewhere and lived forever long until the day he wrote their deaths. Fakir was so loved, that he was given the power of life itself.

Thus was why he lived so far from the inner world of the kingdom. That he lived just barely out the jurisdiction of the monarchs’ rule and law. He was determined to create his own world with his bare hands and thought it right to do so out of the way of peeping eyes and the noisy bustle of the city. He reveled in the peace and quiet that the forest provided him, as well as the freedom to live his way and his way only, be damned the officers and tax collectors and the blistering squeals of parade horns. Be damned the prince in that stone castle on his distant hill. He was at peace with nature and life and the Earth herself and felt no need to leave her lone and demand her creatures move into danger to watch him create what seemed only otherworldly creators could or were allowed to do.

He dotted his final sentence. Signed the ending page with a _'_ _The End’,_ and swirled his signature at the bottom corner of the course paper. The ink settled and dried, and he replaced his goose feather pen into its casing, capped his inkwell, and waited in tranquil silence alongside his furry friends and leafy mates until the flutters of a south wind came tumbling through and fiddled around his writing room, tweaking papers and jostling leaves. The cats at his feet hopped to his lap, the birds to his shoulders, and the insects-- those large swallowtails, to his hair, and they all worked in tandem to relax with him.

Fakir leaned back in his creaking chair, and rested, for doing the work of gods was taxing, and the creative mind never did take time to rest itself when it should, and his wrist hurt like the dickens. Soon, he was asleep, and somewhere, emerging from a white tuft of cloud over a ice-capped mountain, a dragon with white scales like moonlight that glittered pink and purple under the noon sun, nostrils big as ship chimneys and, cold skin that went touched felt as if wet, emerged and settled atop that mountain zenith, coiled around it, and slumbered.

* * *

 

Now again, recall a prince.

 _The_ prince.  

The prince, named Mytho, who had yelled at his guards whom he thought to be conspiring against him for the public, and had a heart attack that made him faint and cause him to go deaf in one ear for an hour, was now sitting up his bed that was so large and soft and covered in thick blankets and looked so tiny in the large space, almost swallowed up in the layers of blankets and sheets and he was ridiculously warm to the point that he had begun to sweat and his heart started to pang again. He had caught tinnitus from the deafening of his ear, and could hear a constant ringing.

He looked towards the portly, mutt-jawed bed-nurse who breathed like a pig in a sauna but smelled like lavender and was sticking and pulling a needle and thread in and out of her embroidery piece. He had figured that this nurse was not his actual one, because he had never seen her before, but then again, he had never seen any other nurse in his estate before. Still, he had a wild thought that she too was sent by the public to spy on him, because he didn't remember ever hiring one.

“Nurse,” He said, “Nurse, where did you come from?”

And courtly she said, “The Yolten mountains, Your Highness.”

He had never heard of such mountains.

“What is there?” He asked.

“There be snow. Lots. Snow whiter than your hair, Sir. Mountains fat and sharp as knives and,” She paused, looked around as if to remember something in her aging head, “And dragons.”

“I see.” He said wistfully, but he did not see, for he had never heard of this strange place that this strange nurse came from, nor had he ever seen a dragon. He had heard of them, but had never seen them and thus always considered them to be but figments of some author’s wild imagination.

“I see.” He said again with aplomb, and dropped backward into the deep cushion of his stack of pillows. He took a breath, blinked his eyes slowly, and tittered.

“Nurse,” He said, losing his impassive tone in wake for one more weary, “Nurse, why am I here?”

“Your heart had a bit o' conniption.” She said with a grin, pushing and pulling with the same incessant nature of one in focus and barely open to the outside stressors or words from nervous princes with bad hearts or stentorian dragon roars or low rumbling earthquakes that did the same pushing and pulling at the plates of the Earth’s crust as the simple, piggy nurse did with her thick and sharp needle of deep grey twine knotted at its shank.

With a bit of enigmatic joy (enigmatic to Mytho, who was very smart sometimes but not all the time, and had found his nurse’s strange joy in his bedridden condition to be very strange and frightening), the nurse chortled in a way that sounded like gravel being trodden on by horse hooves, her pursed lips making the sound round to a devious _‘hu-hu-hu’_ and her sagging skin to jiggle around her round chin. Mytho had half the mind to call in the guards that he was still very unsure were even hired by him and there for his personal protection and not spies from the people to come round and take her back to whatever glen she had come from and bid her stay, but he did not, because he did not trust in them so much.

“I am in love.” He said rather plainly, without any shock or awe or surprise in his mind at all and this made the nurse press her pert lips together in seriousness. “Yes. I seem to have fallen in love of some kind.”

“That is bad.” She said, nonexistent eyebrows pressing close.

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

He felt very tired then, his heart had fluttered sharply and it hurt him with a pinch of muscle. He felt his chest tingle and flutter as did his lungs and yet soon enough as he had awoken to the strangeness of the nurse from the land of dragons and mountains, he was back again into his slumber dreaming of such things that were new and strange to him.

* * *

 

Fakir, who had not much else to do at home, did practically nothing at home. Often times he was never particularly busy because he had very little reason to be. His home was a cabin in the woods of lath and plaster that was held together with long beams of wood in crossing x-shapes along the sides, the roof itself came to a sharp point at the top and as covered in layered brown shingles that rattled when the wind blew too strongly. There were only four rooms, all of them tiny and square and filled to the brim with happy things of happy composition: his small kitchen as adorned with hanging herbs and pans and large wooden spoons on small silver hooks. There was a large square window there that sat above his sink, which sat by a pot-bellied stove that did more warming of the house than it did cooking anything. There were counters, of course, made from dark wood as well, with tiny cabinets with glass faces that housed fruits and plates and jars of jam and cloves of things from garlic to ginger.

Birds sat and watched him when he took cabbage heads apart, leaf by leaf, and pushed them up and down in large bowls of water, and they tittered kindly when he crushed nuts into near dust when he made jams and would lay the first pile of dust onto the sill for them to pick at. Just beside it, a room of shelves of books and tiger vines on those bookshelves and a small rectangular cushion that took only a meager portion of the room, and fit perfectly against the corner he had pushed it in by his writing desk. It was covered in quilts of gaudy mixed prints of flowers to stripes, stitched together to form one cohesive blanket over a stuffed goose-feather mattress, in the room of which he designated as his actual bedroom, despite the technicality of it being a “family room”, of which was confusing to Fakir, for there was not enough room in the house to formulate another room solely for sleep and rest. He had a chair and a desk from which he ate from and wrote from and had his great ideas at.

Lastly, there was the bathroom, of course, which was very small and more like a closet than anything.

He lived alone with only nature and the trees and the animals who lived in those trees, and it had never bothered him ever before that he lived alone. He had not wanted anyone to live with him, and he didn’t wish to live with anyone else either, because that was a messy scenario that he was not prepared for, did not want to be prepared for, and did not try to become prepared for in any way at all, because he did not care and did not wish for it. He was content on his situation, being a bachelor with no worries of children or wives or having to provide for anyone but himself, because it meant he was as free as his writing and ink, and why on earth would he ever not want to keep that?

Because, despite the ever-constant reminding that he was content with being alone, Fakri, who was still human and still had a beating heart with a soul that glew green, and a mind that revved and ran, Fakir was struck with loneliness.

Humans, who are very simple animals, are very sensitive to the world. Just one step above dogs or doves, humans had the unfortunance of holding the ability to emote and think, and subsequently, to think about their emotions and make themselves long for things that are inert and animalistic like a pack or pride or leadership. Humans, who are simply dogs who can think and have thumbs to do things with, have ultimately backed themselves into corners of lonesomeness and fear. They feel nervous at every moment when they are not entertaining or being entertained by another human of which they love or like, and feel guilty when they ponder on why they are nervous and, then wring themselves dry trying to stop feeling so guilty and nervous about the prospect of loneliness until they ultimately die or crawl their way ignominiously into the bosom of someone who had settled to love them out of their own dry-wringing and fear of taking on eternity by themselves.

Fakir, the writer, who was human and had forgotten that fact somewhere along the way, was as lonely and afraid as one who had forgotten that they were human could be. He had found himself thinking too much about the fact that his hands could do what only deities could, and formulated the thick and artless bubble around himself that acted as a noetic echo chamber that told him he was somehow no longer of flesh and blood, and would not return to ashes or dust as was the first man made and all others returned to. It was, perhaps, a false hope. Some sort of winsome idea that he had made from the gifts he was given in the hopes of acquiring some sort of repose from the inevitability of human greeds and needs.  He tried to want not as to keep himself sane with what he had, and he wasted not, for he had only what he had. He wanted no love, but love was a human word that simply meant closeness, and Fakir, the lonely writer who would not admit his loneliness, wanted closeness, which was indeed _love_.

Fakir, all in short, was lonely. Which, as he was now washing his cabbage leaves in his exposed pipe sink as the birds watched him and the hot stove bubbled brown broth and made the house and forest fill with the scent of beef and onions and carrots, had come to his conclusion and made himself red with embarrassment and shame.

He cooked angrily, as if the stew and ingredients were trying to harry him to revelations and succeeding without his consent. And then he ate wearily at his desk, exhausted as if he had ran straight through hell and come out much less than victorious and barely greater than defeated. His hair, a pride of black beauty and strange texture between soft and coarse and thick and silky, was mussed and wild with stress and strain, and his body hurt immensely. Fakir was not a chronic sufferer of anything, nor was he ever addicted to anything, and considered himself with guileless certainty, that he was the most abstemious person he had ever known, yet, due to some mean chicanery by those that made him and everyone else, by some playful and crude shenanigans, he had become addicted to being without shame and being alone, and the taking of those had made him tremble and shake in anxiousness and fall into step with the human condition. How shameful the desire, to want the time of others and their heat beside him?

In terror, he drank his tea. In exasperation, he bathed in his tub, and in equanimity, he settled into his mattress, lay under his quilt, and looked out the circular hole in his ceiling that was capped off with a dome glass, and sighed at the night sky.


End file.
